Nice article and comments. To me, this is the number one priority of next generation social media.

The philosophy of Twitter to create followers and measure that one metric is what I think has most of us trying to fit a square peg (ROI) into a round hole (mindless following).

Twitter's addition of new tools like Lists create new possibilities. If there were a measuring tool that could pump Twitter activity into an analytics program, imagine the possibilities of measurement. But I don't think that is Twitter's business model. So we may struggle with this tool for a while.

I do like that the search engines are getting more involved in indexing this content though, including lists. Its this increased interest from Google and Bing that may end up holding the key to our social media salvation.